Welcome to the Jungle

The Boys' Jungle

Be weary of all those wires, circuits, overloads, downloads, RSS feeds, viruses, trojans, anti viruses, browsers, 3D, cd, dvd, ROM, RAM and servers. When I studied Computer Studies in secondary school (just the other day) the most confusing terms I had to learn were bits and bytes.

Today, children have surpassed all of these technical terms by age five and seven. I remember being extremely embarrassed recently as I sat at my desk fiddling away at my laptop when a seven year old boy enquired about whether I was on FB and used Skype. He also volunteered to help me programme my i-pod when he saw how frustrated I was, while manipulating it.

These boys are absolute geniuses when it comes to technology. So the million dollar questions are
1. How come we still cannot return boys to the normal learning curve?
2.Don’t we know what they like and are good at? (Mind you, girls can be just as good)

It is no secret that new information technologies challenge us with new modes of text, opportunities to cater for different learning styles, interests, creativity and motivation for boys. These provide important opportunities for engagement in rich reading, writing and visual literacy activities.

Researchers such as (Daly, 2002, p. 16) point to the fact that visual images “accelerate” boys’ learning. They thrive on the visual language of television, cartoons, and video games due to a high orientation to visual/spatial learning. They therefore respond well when presented with the opportunity to present their ideas and written work using charts, flow diagrams, and other visual forms.


LET'S GET WITH IT TEACHERS

Keep following Millennium Reading Specialist for further discussions boys' literacy